Tag Archives: X.509

Advanced Troubleshooting of Certificate Validation Related Problems on Windows Part 2

One of the most complicated things to troubleshoot in X.509 is failures related to Name Constraints handling, there are a few ways to approach this but one of the easiest is to use the Extended Error Information in the Certificate viewer.

Lets walk through an exercise so you can try using this on your own, first download this script, if you extract its contents and run makepki.bat you get a multi-level PKI that looks something like this:

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Before we begin its useful to understand that Name Constraints are applied at an Issuing CA level, in this case the constraints say that the CA is authoritative for any DNS or RFC822 name within in the example.com domain, it also allows a specific base distinguished name (DN).

In our example these constraints are applied by the “Test Partner CA” on to the “Customer CA”; you can see the restrictions in its certificate:

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This script creates two certificates, one for email (user.cer) and another for SSL (www.cer), normally the script makes both of these certificates fall within the example.com domain space but for the purpose of this post I have modified the openssl.cfg to put the email certificate in the acme.com domain. — The idea here is that since this domain is not included in the constraints a RFC 3280 compliant chain engine will reject it and we have an error to diagnose.

Normally we don’t already know what the failure associated with a certificate chain is, after all that’s why we are debugging it but the process we use here will help us figure out the answer — applications are notorious for sharing why a certificate chain was rejected.

Since we can’t rely on the applications one way for us to figure this out on our own is to look at the chain outside of the application in the Windows Certificate viewer to see if we can tell what the issue is there.

Let’s start by looking at the “good” certificate:

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What’s important here is that we see no errors, but how do we know that? Well let’s look at the bad certificate and see what the difference is:

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The certificate clearly has a problem and Windows has done a decent job of telling us what the problem was, there is a name in this certificate that is inconsistent with the Name Constraints associated with this certificate chain. The question is — which name?

To answer that question we need to look at the Name Constraints, remember that this is in the CA certificates it can be in any or all of them which means we need to first figure out where the Constraints are.

To do that we start at the “Certification Path”, here you see something like this:

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Notice the little yellow flag, that’s the certificate viewer saying this is where the problem is, let’s take a look at that certificate:

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But wait! There isn’t a problem with this one, that’s because this certificate is actually good it’s the certificate it issued that is the problem. Here is the non-obvious part, let’s look at the details tab:

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Here we see Windows is telling us exactly what the problem was with the certificate that this CA has issued, it is the email address and its inclusion of the acme.com domain.

Remember that it was restricted, via the Name Constraints extension, to the example.com domain when issuing email certificates. The chain engine would be non-compliant with the associated RFC if it trusted this certificate.

But why did we see this Extended Error Information in this certificate and not the leaf itself? This is actually by design and makes sense when you think about it. Name Constraints can exist in each issuing CA certificate in the chain and what is happening here is that CryptoAPI is telling us that the issuer certificate that was flagged is the offending actor.

This Extended Error Information is available in the Certificate Viewer in a number of cases (for example Revocation), though most of the interesting cases require the application to launch the certificate viewer as you get to view the certificate chain (and all of the associated state) that they were using when they encountered the problem.

Advanced Troubleshooting of Certificate Validation Related Problems on Windows Part 1

The Windows platform for validating X.509 certificates has a feature I don’t see many discuss — its robust logging subsystem.

This allows a non-developer (and developers) to get insights into what is happening with applications interactions with CryptoAPI 2 and to some degree what is happening inside those APIs.

To use this feature you must first enable it, the easiest way to do that is via the EventViewer Management Console (eventvwr.msc), once in there you must navigate to the CryptoAPI 2 (CAPI2) node of the viewer:

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Once you get there you select Properties on the operational log, which will give you a dialog that looks something like this:

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Once you “Enable Logging” and “Apply” the changes, immediately all calls to CryptoAPI will be logged. CryptoAPI is used all the time so by the time you close that dialog you will have some events you can look at:

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The high level view of each event doesn’t tell you much, for example in the above picture we really only know that the action that was being performed with a “Build Chain”, this particular event corresponds to a call to CertGetCertificateChain.

To really understand what is going on you need to look at the Details tab:

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Here we can see what was passed into a given into that API call, we can see what certificates we passed in by the calling application, what settings they chose when making that call:

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Some other things you can see in this particular API call include what the disposition of the call was and of course what certificate chain was built.

Every major API in CryptoAPI has logging similar to this, you get to see what is passed in and what came out. Additionally major “objects” are sometimes logged as well, for example here is an event showing a certificate that CryptoAPI was operating against:

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Another very useful API to be able to look at is CertVerifyRevocation, this will be logged in this fashion:

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Some of these events include references to temporary files, for example in this case you see:

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This is a CRL for the “GlobalSign PersonalSign 1 CA – G2”, its stored in the Time Valid Object Cahce (TvoCache), you can look at this cache with the “certutil –urlcache” command.

 

The events will all tell you which application was the caller and if they are part of a sequence of tasks you get enough information to correlate them and put them in order.

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I won’t go through all of the events but as you can see this is super valuable when trying to figure out – Why did that application do that?!

As you might imagine this logging can slow things down and produces a bunch of data so be sure to turn it off when you are done.